CMB cold spot

This article is about the possible supervoid in the constellation Eridanus. For the supervoid in Canes Venatici, see Giant Void.

Circled area is the cold spot.

The CMB Cold Spot or WMAP Cold Spot is a region of the sky seen in microwaves which analysis found to be unusually large and cold relative to the expected properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). The "cold spot" is approximately 70 µK colder than the average CMB temperature (approximately 2.7 K), whereas the root mean square of typical temperature variations is only 18 µK.[1][nb 1]

Typically, the largest fluctuations of the primordial CMB temperature occur on angular scales of about 1°. Thus a cold region as large as the "cold spot" appears very unlikely, given generally accepted theoretical models. Various alternative explanations exist, including a so-called Eridanus Supervoid or Great Void. This would be an extremely large region of the universe, roughly 150 to 300 Mpc or 500 million to one billion light-years across,[2] at redshift , containing a density of matter much smaller than the average density at that redshift.[citation needed] Such a void would affect the observed CMB via the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. If a comparable supervoid did exist, it would be one of the largest structures in the observable universe.

In the first year of data recorded by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) a region of sky in the constellation Eridanus was found to be cooler than the surrounding area.[3] Subsequently, using the data gathered by WMAP over 3 years, the statistical significance of such a large, cool region was estimated. The probability of finding a deviation at least as high in Gaussian simulations was found to be 1.85%.[4] Thus it appears unlikely, but not impossible, that the cold spot was generated by the standard mechanism of quantum fluctuations during cosmological inflation, which in most inflationary models gives rise to Gaussian statistics. The cold spot may also, as suggested in the references above, be a signal of non-Gaussian primordial fluctuations.

Some authors called into question the statistical significance of this cold spot.[5]

In 2013 the CMB Cold Spot was also observed by the Planck satellite[6] at similar significance, discarding the possibility of being caused by a systematic error of the WMAP satellite.

The large 'cold spot' forms part of what has been called an 'axis of evil' (so named because it is unanticipated to see structure[7]) which has been explained using several contexts: "many authors have commented about how the AE impacts our understanding of how structure emerged in the Universe within the framework of CDM and hydro-gravitational dynamics (HGD)"[8]

One possible explanation of the cold spot is a huge void between us and the primordial CMB. Voids can produce a cooler region than surrounding sightlines from the late-time integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect.[10] This effect would be much smaller if dark energy was not stretching the void as photons went through it.

Rudnick et al.[11] found a dip in NVSS galaxy number counts in the direction of the Cold Spot, suggesting the presence of a supervoid. Since then, some additional works have cast doubt on the supervoid explanation. The correlation between the NVSS dip and the Cold Spot was found to be marginal using a more conservative statistical analysis.[12] Also, a direct survey for galaxies in several one-degree-square fields within the Cold Spot found no evidence for a supervoid.[13] However, the supervoid explanation has not been ruled out entirely; it remains intriguing, since supervoids do seem capable of affecting the CMB measurably.[9][14][15]

Although large voids are known in the universe, a void would have to be exceptionally vast to explain the cold spot, perhaps 1,000 times larger in volume than expected typical voids. It would be 6 billion–10 billion light-years away and nearly one billion light-years across, and would be perhaps even more improbable to occur in the large scale structure than the WMAP cold spot would be in the primordial CMB.

A controversial claim by Laura Mersini-Houghton is that it could be the imprint of another universe beyond our own, caused by quantum entanglement between universes before they were separated by cosmic inflation.[2] Laura Mersini-Houghton said, "Standard cosmology cannot explain such a giant cosmic hole" and made the remarkable hypothesis that the WMAP cold spot is "… the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own." If true, this provides the first empirical evidence for a parallel universe (though theoretical models of parallel universes existed previously). It would also support string theory[citation needed]. The team claims there are testable consequences for its theory. If the parallel universe theory is true there will be a similar void in the opposite hemisphere of the Celestial sphere[17][18] (which New Scientist reported to be the Southern hemisphere; the results of the New Mexico array study reported it as Northern hemisphere[2]).

A sophisticated computational analysis (using Kolmogorov complexity) has derived evidence for a north and a south cold spot in the satellite data:[19] "...among the high randomness regions is the southern non-Gaussian anomaly, the Cold Spot, with a stratification expected for the voids. Existence of its counterpart, a Northern Cold Spot with almost identical randomness properties among other low-temperature regions is revealed."

These predictions and others were made prior to the measurements (see Laura Mersini).[citation needed] However, apart from the Southern Cold Spot, the varied statistical methods in general fail to confirm each other regarding a Northern Cold Spot.[20] The 'K-map' used to detect the Northern Cold Spot was noted to have twice the measure of randomness measured in the standard model. The difference is speculated to be caused by the randomness introduced by voids (unaccounted-for voids were speculated to be the reason for the increased randomness above the standard model).[21]

The cold spot is mainly anomalous because it stands out compared to the relatively hot ring around it; it is not unusual if one only considers the size and coldness of the spot itself.[5] More technically, its detection and significance depends on using a compensated filter like a Mexican hat wavelet to find it.

^After the dipole anisotropy, which is due to the Doppler shift of the microwave background radiation due to our peculiar velocity relative to the comoving cosmic rest frame, has been subtracted out. This feature is consistent with the Earth moving at some 627 km/s towards the constellation Virgo.